Tightness, Part III

Today is payday. Finally.

This didn't help me yesterday, however, when I had to drain half of our savings account to pay my first student loan bill.

Look, nothing can be done about it right now. I know this because I pored over the entire servicer's website, reading all of their details and fine print. Here's what it boiled down to, basically:

• Even though I've applied for forbearance, until the forms are received and processed, I still need to pay the entirety of the bill before or when it's due.
• If I don't, it goes into delinquency and then collections/default, all of which is really, really bad.
• To change your payment plan, it's not a simple click -- no, you have to apply for it, and it doesn't end there -- it's a process just like anything else that you have to be approved for.
• In changing my payment plan -- which I can't do yet -- it would only cut my payments down to about 2/3 of what they are now, and would skyrocket my interest. Oh yes, I looked. There's something like a 200% increase on my interest over the course of repayment if I do that.
• If I were to change my payment plan, I can't do it before the forbearance forms are received and processed, as they base it on what your payment is every month. They'd see that I was on a different payment plan that would no longer qualify me for forbearance and would deny it instantly. 
• I have not even received the confirmation that the forms were received and have been sent for processing, which tells me that a) either the fax machine at work didn't actually send them even though it told me it did, or b) the processing people don't even have them yet because they're so backlogged.
• As we're still within the ten business days required for a response/receipt of the forms, my hands are tied.

So, I had to transfer money from our savings account into our checking account and pay the damn bill. I was exceedingly, seethingly angry about this, but it's done now. I retrieved the forms from work last night, stuck them into an envelope this morning with a new letter saying, basically, "hey, did you receive these when I faxed them to you? Well, if not, here they are again with proof that I faxed them and I still need this done." I mailed it out earlier this afternoon. I no longer trust the fax machine at work as it took nowhere near this long last year to get this shit done once I faxed it in from the university.

Ten business days from today is the 26th, accounting for Christmas Eve/Christmas that adds two more since they'll be closed, and adding in another four days (giving leeway for the postal service here to mail an envelope to Pennsylvania) would be Friday the 2nd (or Monday the 5th at latest, given New Year's as well). Even accounting for holidays there's still a month between now and when my next bill is due for them to process this shit, so for now this saga comes to a close until I hear something back within the next month one way or the other.

Daisy, of course, ever the pragmatist who wants to solve unsolvable problems, basically told me that I need to take control of this situation as she knows how much it's stressing me out. At this point I've really done everything I can to take control of it. Without confirmation of the receipt of my application, I could call them day and night and they'd be like "who are you? Oh, we still need those forms to come through. Buhbye."

She also mentioned that she wants me to take control of the situation with my car as well, which she also knows is greatly stressing me out. I told her that I'm not going to be the person who, just like the callers we deal with at work, call to berate someone for not doing their job. I shouldn't have to, and I'm not the person that gets aggressive with someone who obviously doesn't care about my business or want it -- I have requested the U Pull It people to call me twice now with any sort of offer (or even acknowledgement that they care about people trying to contact them), and I'm now done with them. I told her she could call if she wants to; otherwise this weekend I will more than likely just list the car on Craigslist and sell it to the first person who can haul it away and pay in cash.

Because today is payday, I was able to pay the stack of bills I had sitting next to my desk this morning, mostly invoices for Christmas gifts I've ordered for the family from Publisher's Clearing House over the past month or so. I was also able to finish Christmas shopping for Daisy, using Amazon as my greatest tool/weapon of choice there, and within an hour of ordering her gifts, one of them had already shipped. I am now completely done shopping for Daisy unless I find one or more little things while we're out over the next two weeks or so. I'm pretty sure she's done for me as well, so all we have left now is to get whatever we're getting for my parents and finish up whatever she has left for hers.

Oh, and wait for the other stuff I ordered to arrive in the mail, because I have orders from November 7, 8, 9, and the 26th that haven't arrived yet. One contains gifts for the nieces/nephews (who we won't even see on Christmas anyway, so it's okay if it's slow, I guess), one for Daisy, one for Mama, and another for Daisy. As I'm beginning to lose hope that they'll arrive before Christmas with the large volume of mail orders that come in around this time of year, I doubled down today for Daisy and got her six different things, with a seventh that both of us can enjoy. The first shipment arrives on Sunday. No, seriously, on Sunday. Amazon is doing Sunday deliveries now.

Since I've now gone through more than an entire book of stamps in sending out the first...oh, third or so of my Christmas cards to friends and family, I also ordered two more books of Rudolph stamps (because why not?) this afternoon, and was told point blank on the USPS website that it would take them at least two business days longer to process because of high mail volume this time of year. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me, really. Hopefully they will ship them quickly and I'll be able to use some of them on the actual Christmas cards I'm sending out. I do have to mail bills too, you know. There's at least three or four bills every month (not counting the orders I have to pay for) that we still have to write checks for.

In a short while, I shall go to work to face what I call "the wrath of Friday." Fridays are historically bad there as we tend to get slammed with lots of issues that need to be taken care of before the weekend.